List all Kafka 0.10 topics using - -zookeeper flag without access to Zookeeper

Question

I'm using kafka 0.10 without zookeeper. I want to get kafka topics list. This command is not working since we're not using zookeeper: bin/kafka-topics.sh --list --zookeeper localhost:2181. How can I get the same output without zookeeper?

Answer 1

Kafka uses ZooKeeper so you need to first start a ZooKeeper server if you don't already have one.

If you do not want to install and have a separate zookeeper server, you can use the convenience script packaged with kafka to get a quick-and-dirty single-node ZooKeeper instance.

Starting the single-node Zookeeper instance:

bin/zookeeper-server-start.sh config/zookeeper.properties 

Starting the Kafka Server:

bin/kafka-server-start.sh config/server.properties 

Listing the Topics available in Kafka:

bin/kafka-topics.sh --list --zookeeper localhost:2181 

Answer 2

Kafka 2.2 and up

Newer versions of Kafka no longer requires ZooKeeper connection string to list topics, but can directly go via the Kafka brokers. kafka-topics.sh is provided in the bin/ folder when downloading Kafka. To list topics, do the following:

bin/kafka-topics.sh --list --bootstrap-server <BROKER-LIST>